Martin Gardner on Natural Selection
REM dreaming surely serves some useful function, otherwise why would evolution have invented it?
–Martin Gardner, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000), p. 216.
Like any good scientist, and uncomfortably like many bad pseudo-scientists, I have my own share of crackpot theories that I believe in. One of them is the idea that an abundance of people, scientists and non-scientists alike, misunderstand and therefore misapply the concept of Natural Selection in evolution, because of a rather simple but profound confusion concerning the logic of the "excluded middle".
They mistakenly believe that natural selection works positively to select for beneficial characteristics, rather than negatively to select against detrimental characteristics. To the excluded-middle people (e.g., "You're either for us or against us" or "If you don't hate homosexuals then you're promoting homosexuality" or "You either trust the President or you hate America"), this distinction has no import, since they see the two as logically equivalent (and would likely dismiss it as some sort of double-negative drivel).
This mistaken view would have it that newly developed characteristics fall into one of two categories: 1) a characteristic that is beneficial to the organism's survival; or 2) a characteristic that is detrimental to the organism's survival. Unfortunately this ignores the third possibility: 3) a characteristic that is neutral to the organism's survival.
I'm sure that on first reading this third option wouldn't seem to get us much further in clarifying the operation of Natural Selection, but it does. There are implications, which I'll try to get back to discussing later, that bear on the ridiculous notions that theorists invent to explain things like elephants' trunks, and those silly controversies about "missing links" and the "half-an-eye" or "half-a-wing" conundrums.
on Thursday, 31 March 2005 at 19.31
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[…] ep better if I jot down a few sentences. (I've alluded to this idea before, here and here.) In short, I've long wondered whether many hard-core Darwinists have made a slight error in percepti […]